


few and far between

by sheelia



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Wormholes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 11:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7507342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheelia/pseuds/sheelia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you think… in a different time, a different dimension, we would meet again?” Keith asks.</p><p>Tilting his head over so that he’s looking Keith in the eye, Shiro smirks.</p><p>“Yeah. I’d bet on us.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	few and far between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [themorninglark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/gifts).



> For Lark - Thanks for dragging me into this hell hole. And for filling my timeline with wonderful voltron tweets. Yours were the first fic I read in this fandom, and I'm still in awe. I hope you like this!
> 
> I liked the idea of wormholes and their unpredictable possibilities, and it seemed relevant at the end of the season... so...
> 
> Mood: [Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois -- Sufjan Stevens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR2TqWDqO_w)

The first time he sees a wormhole he doesn’t register it completely. The sheer monstrosity of it somehow washes over him like a huge wave, and the moment is over in a flash. He lands three hundred light years away in a galaxy he cannot even name, but it’s okay – it’s not even that important. Beside him, the Black Lion leaps ahead, and Keith follows.

The second time he passes through a wormhole he doesn’t even see it. He’s in the docking bay in the Castle of Lions awaiting departure, already secured into his seat in the Red Lion. Overhead, he hears Coran’s voice from the speakers alerting them to their imminent entrance into the wormhole. He’d heard about those things before from his classes at the Garrison Academy, something about the warping of spacetime and exceeding the third dimension. At that point, however, Keith was more concerned about getting up into the sky than the application of theoretical physics.

He finally notices the wormhole the third time, as they’re fleeing from the Galra Empire. His Red Lion is carried away in the mouth of the Black Lion, racing back to the Castle of Lions. The alarms are blaring, an incessant siren permeating the entire cockpit, but the noise drowns out as soon as he lays his eyes on the wormhole that the castle managed to create. It overwhelms him completely, and it regards it stunned, as if he’d been held underwater.

He watches how the light bends, the stars on its edges stretched, squeezed, and then stretched again as if it were putty in a child’s hands. It sits in the middle of the black expanse of space oddly placed, like a wrong puzzle piece that stubbornly managed to fit. Everything seems to move away from him then, and before he knows it he’s back in the docking bay, his Red Lion barely landing on its own four feet.

“We made it, buddy,” Shiro’s voice comes through in his helmet, half in surprise and half in relief that they’re still alive. He’s laughing, bright and weightless. Shiro’s voice has always had that quality about it – the ability to take him back to a moment in time like a time machine.

Everything shakes violently then, and Keith instinctively reaches out to grab the handles on the dashboard in front of him to brace himself. “What’s going on?” Shiro’s voice comes again, before getting cut off by cosmic interference. Before Keith can even grasp the situation he’s in, he’s jettisoned from the castle, hurled out of the docking bay along with the other four lions, each spiralling out of control.

He watches it all unravel: his hand getting distorted in front of his own eyes, the walls of the wormhole bleeding red, and the other lions and the castle escaping further and further away from him until they were nothing but dots, and then, _nothing_.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_“You need to start paying attention in your classes,” Shiro laments, slapping the back of Keith’s head. He has his head propped up by his arm, and he’s lazily slumped in his seat as he watches Keith assemble the pens and ruler in his pencil case into an airplane. “I won’t be here to tutor you after I graduate at the end of the year, you know.”_

_“Fine,” Keith finally concedes after fifteen minutes of being distracted. He unclips his pens from his ruler and shoves them all back into his pencil case. “So what was it you were saying about those holes again?”_

_Shiro pushes himself upright and explains patiently, “The Einstein-Rosen bridge is a feature that can essentially connect two separate points in spacetime. Here, space and time are not separate, like what we generally perceive it to be. Instead, space and time are a continuous entity._

_A wormhole works like this: Imagine the universe as a piece of paper, only the universe is not two dimensional, but three. If I wanted to get from point A on this end, to point B on that end, I would have to travel this long line, which would take thousands and thousands of light years. However, since the universe is three dimensional, I can create a shortcut like this.”_

_Shiro bends the piece of paper on itself, aligning the two crosses carefully, then using one of Keith’s pens, he pierces through both sides._

_“To create a wormhole like this you need a huge, huge mass, so huge that it distorts space, like a metal ball weighing down on a sheet of saran wrap. To traverse a wormhole you would need the tunnel to stay open, and that’s where negative mass comes in. It comes in from the other side and connects the two distant points together.”_

_Keith drops the pen twirling in his hand._

_“This is all theoretical, of course. Not only can you travel from one place to another, but you might also land in an alternate universe, a different point in time. Who knows?” Shiro finished, his eyes wide and bright. And then, “Keith.”_

_Keith gets caught staring – staring at Shiro’s hands as they gesture, staring at Shiro’s lips as he talks – and he almost falls off his chair. He gulps and asks a question to show that he was listening. Only after Shiro takes off for his next class and he’s facing a blank problem set, does he realize that he’d not got anything down at all._

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The Kerberos mission was a success.

Keith hears about the news as he’s being told off in the principal’s office about his “attitude problems”. The words, loud and clear, are broadcast through the halls of Garrison Academy about the recent graduate Takashi Shirogane. The spacecraft is on route back to Earth, and will enter Earth’s atmosphere in five hours. Just in time for him to get out of school and witness it himself.

“Are you listening, boy?” His principal raises his voice. Keith nods a firm yes. Anything to get him out of the office.

In the countdown towards Shiro’s arrival, Keith attends all his classes. He participates in all of them, fully engaged, and causes no trouble. He has to curl his hands into fists so hard that they leave crescent shaped depressions in his flesh, so that he doesn’t punch the idiots in his class. He sees his hazy future come together now, his choices and options aligning until he can picture himself standing next to Shiro on the flight deck, clad in the same uniforms. He can’t afford to flunk out now.

After school he takes his motorbike and races off to Garrison Headquarters to watch the astronauts’ descent. True to their words, the spacecraft re-enters Earth’s atmosphere at 5:00 p.m., the metal of the spacecraft glinting bright in the sky like a second sun. The copper on its surface bleeds into the copper of the sunset, and for the first time Keith feels his heart swell. He clutches the foreign feeling in his chest afraid, but he also keeps it there right over his heart, not wanting to let it go.

Garrison officials and other authorized personnel swarm the landed spacecraft, affording Keith not even a sliver of a glimpse. A security guard approaches him and asks for identification, and Keith decides that he could wait a few more hours. Any more trouble at the academy would land him in unfavorable consequences.

Someone comes into his room in the middle of the night, the thick metal doors sliding open without resistance. The sound of the door opening jolts him awake, and he falls ungracefully off his bed and onto the floor with a loud thud. The light from the hallway almost blinds him, and it casts a long box of light across his floor. He recognizes the familiar figure at the doorway instantly from the shape of his torso, the sterile white light veiling his silhouette, and Keith chokes on the air in his throat.

“You wear your fingerless gloves to sleep?” is the first thing Shiro says to Keith after two months. Once he steps into the darkness his face starts to resurface. A cheeky smile is hanging on his lips, and he bends down next to Keith, who still has his blanket pooled around his waist, saying, “I brought you back a souvenir.”

Up till that point Keith had not uttered a word. He opens and closes his mouth multiple times, but his mind draws a blank. He holds the moon rock in his palm and it’s the size of a clenched fist. It weighs down on his skin just barely, and the rough edges of it dig into his skin. He thinks, looking at the size of it overwhelm his stretched palm, _that’s it. That’s my heart in my hand_.

“It only felt like a few hours,” Shiro says a little later into the night, after a moment of reflection. He’s laying on Keith side, the both of them a little too large for a twin sized bed. Both their feet hang off the edge of the mattress, and Keith is slotted in perfectly against him. “Funny how gravity works.”

Keith is still holding onto his moon rock. He confesses, “Those were the two most boring months of my life.”

Shiro’s hand rests innocuously on Keith’s lap, tracing perfect circles as he stares absently at Keith’s unimpressive ceiling. Keith blurts out suddenly – _Shiro_ – and he stalls, internally trying to process his actions. The hand on his lap freezes, and Keith feels time in his bedroom slow. He can almost trace the small shadows of light dancing across his ceiling.

Slowly, he pulls out the words that have been lingering in the back of his mouth all night. “Shiro, I- I love you,” he says breathlessly, and the words hang above them, unwavering, like permanent fixtures in the night sky.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Keith witnesses the end of the world right in front of him. He watches the last of the Galra Empire’s ships crash onto the surface of Arus, and he watches Zarkon’s own ship perish in flames. From the flames, a new world emerges.

Voltron awaits a hint of life, standing ready to continue fighting. Its arms and torso were badly scuffed, releasing stray sparks of electricity every time it moved. But it is still standing, and that is all that matters. After a long lapse of silence, Voltron disassembles, and the five lions land on the ground.

Lance comes tumbling out of the Blue Lion and literally kisses the ground, to Keith’s disgust. Hunk pukes, both from the trauma and from having survived the ordeal. Pidge stands between them, the only semblance of normalcy in chaos.

It smells like charcoal, the heavy musk of ash hanging in the air. Keith watches bits of fire rise up into the sky until they vanish completely, and he wonders where on earth they’re headed to next.

“A pity about Arus,” Shiro comments as he emerges out of the Black Lion. “It was such a beautiful planet.”

At that moment, Keith’s legs carry him in a jog, and then a sprint, and he tackles Shiro in a back-crushing hug. Shiro starts laughing, his voice almost but not nearly drowned out in the raging inferno a distance away, and Keith feels like he’s got the whole universe in his arms. He thinks, _if I survived this, I can survive anything_.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“Kogane,” a voice comes from far away, sounding as if it made it’s way through twists and turns, only to finally arrive distorted, a shell of what it used to be. Still, he recognizes it instantly. It must have been the damaged receiver on his spacesuit.

He turns to see Shirogane approach him, only a few feet away. He’s leaping across the surface of Kepler-16B, carrying with him a bag of samples they’d collected from the planet. His black hair showed a little through the window on his helmet, and it plastered onto his forehead from the sweat.

“We’ve got the last of the samples we needed. Ever,” he heaves in excitement. “It’s finally time to head back to Earth.” He holds the bag out in front of him proudly.

Kogane lets his arms fall to the sides of his body, tilts his head back just so, and looks overhead at the two suns in the sky, chasing each other day to day on a wild goose chase.

But now it’s over. It’s finally over. Slowly, both suns disappear beyond the horizon as they set, casting the dusty planet in a warm afterglow. The second sun has finally caught up to the first, and he can see everything materialize in front of his eyes – his home, his family, and-

“Hey dumbass! Are you coming or not?” Shirogane shouts from the foot of his Red Lion, the volume of his voice amplified through Kogane’s shitty helmet speakers.

“Don’t speak to your leader like that,” Kogane replies, all bark and no bite, as he dashes back towards his Black Lion.

He’s going to lead his team home.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Shiro slides a bottle of Tsingtao beer across the wooden table, stopping it right between Keith’s hands. “Drink up,” he says, settling into his stool.

Keith has to blink his being back into consciousness. He looks down at his ten fingers spread out on the cheap wood, feeling strangely hollow and not at all there. The time on his wristwatch reads 2:13 a.m. No wonder.

Behind him, a waitress squeezes past between the cramped seats in the tavern, raising her tray over his head as she steps across inch by inch, briefly eclipsing the light that shone over him. The calendar on the wall reads December 28th 1999. Although now since it’s past midnight, it’s the 29th. Someone should go up to rip yesterday’s page off.

Shiro tilts his bottle of beer back and takes several large gulps. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he says, “New year’s eve is coming soon. Imagine the shit show we’ll get when the clock strikes midnight. No one knows what’s going to happen when we enter year 2000. Some people think we’re going to die, and they’re going to do stupid things like rob a bank or something.”

Keith chuckles into his drink, his amusement amplified as it reverberated inside the wall of the glass bottle, “We chose the wrong decade to be cops.”

Shiro had been his partner since the police academy, followed by their recent posting to the station right on the edge of Kowloon Bay. After shifts, especially on rough days like these, Shiro liked to make a trip down to his favorite hole-in-the-wall tavern in Mong Kok. There wasn’t anything particularly distinctive about that place – in fact, Keith had trouble finding the place the first time he had to travel there himself; it looked so similar to the two larger pubs flanking it that it almost disappeared from plain sight. That was what made Shiro like it. It was also easily accessible by the train. All Keith had to do was follow the overhead train tracks for around a block, and turn right on the first street he saw. Slowly, after-shift drinks became a ritual.

Even though he’d spent almost every day of his past four years with Shiro, tonight is the first time he takes a real good look at him. The wound on Shiro’s cheek healed up nicely – a small gash from a petty thief – but it left a faint scar that one could only really see if he went up close. The tuft of hair at the front of his head almost covered his eyes, which signalled that it was time for a haircut. Setting down his emptied bottle, Shiro’s rosy cheeks are glowing. For a moment, Keith forgets everything.

In the distance, the passing train heaves and pounds, as if it’s tunnelling to the center of his heart.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_“The thing you said about wormholes the other day,” Keith mentions out of nowhere. They’re on the rooftop of Garrison Academy a few days before Shiro’s first outer space mission. Here, with no high rising buildings to block their view, the sky seemed like a large seamless blanket that stretched for miles on end. It looked like it was going to rain, which was rare. The clouds rolled over and folded onto themselves, piling up high._

_“Yeah, what about them?” Shiro responds. He has on a different uniform now, an olive green-gray suit with gold stripes on his sleeves. It makes Keith’s orange uniform look like a halloween costume._

_“I thought about them for a bit since then,” he says haltingly, trying to grasp the significance of his conclusions. “Some things are just bound to happen, whether you like it or not. No matter how much you try to avoid it. You might go through twists and turns but you’ll always land on the same path.”_

_Shiro hums in agreement._

_“Do you think… in a different time, a different dimension, we would meet again?” Keith asks._

_Tilting his head over so that he’s looking Keith in the eye, Shiro smirks._

_“Yeah. I’d bet on us.”_

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“That’s him,” he hears somebody at his lunch table whisper. “That’s the best fighter pilot in the whole Garrison Academy.”

From the direction of everyone’s turned heads Keith finds the person in question. He’s sitting several benches away in the cafeteria, peacefully munching on a ham sandwich, wholly unaware of the dozens of freshmen eyes staring at him. Keith shifts a little in his seat, straining for a better view.

Eventually, the boy notices he’s being stared at, and to Keith’s horror his eyes find his first. And Keith – he’s already thinking of an apology, an excuse, or an escape plan – but then it all leaves him suddenly, like someone’s pulled out the plug in a bathtub filled with water.

Inside him, everything from his past, present, and future collapsed and coalesced into his core like a raw plum pit, packing everything he’s ever known in a single memory, so precious that it’s tight in his fist.

The boy looks at him the same. Keith watches his eyes widen as the moments pass.

He remembers.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Also, thanks to Sabrina who screamed with me, as well as Eliza, who stopped reading the draft because she hasn't seen Voltron yet. Go watch it now. I don't wanna suffer alone.
> 
> Update (7/17/16): Eliza has finished watching the entire season in a day. She's the real MVP
> 
> Mentions of the original japanese voltron characters: Kogane Akira (Keith) and Shirogane Takashi
> 
> Cry with me on twitter @refois


End file.
